For this year's .NET Summercamp 2007 we find ourselves in the lucky position of having more speakers and session suggestions than slots available. What we needed was a session suggestion and rating system allowing our speakers to submit proposals that could later be approved by us. Of course there are large conference management systems out there, often with boatloads of unneeded functionality like billing. We rather wanted to use a simple tool at no cost.
So I went and wrote it myself an ASP.NET 2.0 web application. The outcome of my efforts, named Session Manager, is available on CodePlex. Session Manager is free software licensed under the BSD License.
If you're running a user group or plan to organize larger events besides regular user group meetings, Session Manager certainly is worth a try. If you find it not yet perfect, please go ahead grab the source code and customize it to your needs or post a suggestion. I already wrote down some ideas on improvements.
Session Manager was a great opportunity to build an application with the Model View Presenter and WebNavigator patterns in mind. One has to write a little more code (mostly interface definitions) but gains great testability and portability across web and rich clients.
I've created a demo installation based on the current version. Go ahead and fiddle, you can't damage anything.
Have fun!
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